Roughly two weeks after launching Office 2011, Microsoft has rolled out an update that aims to improve the security and stability of the latest version of its office productivity suite.
Per Macworld, the release notes for the Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 14.0.1 Update say that the release fixes “critical issues” in the latest version of Office that could cause components of the suite to stop responding or quit unexpectedly. Microsoft says the update also fixes a security vulnerability that could allow an attack to overwrite the contents of a computer’s memory with malicious code.
As for performance and stability improvements in the 14.0.1 update, the company says that the update includes form-based authentication for connecting to Microsoft Office SharePoint Servers, allowing user credentials to be transmitted through HTML forms that users complete. The update also allows images copied from an Office for Mac application to be edited when copied back to ChemDraw; previously, images were locked when copied to the molecule editor.
Excel for Mac 2011 gets fixes that stop the spreadsheet program from crashing when a macro is enabled and allow cells to update when revisions are made to related data. The update also improves reliability when the FORMAT macro command is used. The update improves the stability of Word 2011 when users build equations, while bolstering stability of PowerPoint 2011 slideshows. Microsoft also improved compatibility with the Windows versions of its presentation software that now allows numbered lists to be displayed correctly in PowerPoint 2011.
Outlook 2011 gets a number of improvements in this update, including better reliability for deleting messages from multiple IMAP accounts, a Sync Services fix, and improved reliability for importing Office 2008 identities into the new version of the suite. The update also allows Outlook to retain e-mail passwords in the keychain after users import new accounts into the mail client.
Additional details can be located here and if you’ve tried the update and noticed any changes, please let us know.